MidnightCanuck

I’m an antisocial nerd, so I’m bad at communicating. I asked AI to help clean up my flow of consciousness to be more easily understandable for everyone. This is the last thing I’ll say on the Ember situation… sorry it is long, you don’t have to read it: The old internet was built for this. Social circles, MMOs, avatars, and handles let people be themselves or be something else entirely. You could be a different gender, a different species, a completely invented person, and the space treated that as normal rather than a problem to solve. For a lot of nerds, that was the point. The character was the version of you that existed there. You didn’t owe anyone a tour of the body sitting at the keyboard just because they decided they liked talking to you. Ember said “I’m a woman” and “I’m not a man.” In my rule set, that was still the character. The whole point of kayfabe is that the persona speaks as the persona. If the character is a woman, the character says she’s a woman. That doesn’t automatically turn into a claim that the person behind the account is biologically female, any more than a male VTuber playing a catgirl is claiming to be a cat. I don’t have a problem with Ember keeping the female character. Online, the persona is the person you’re dealing with. The avatar, the voice, the consistent presentation—that’s the identity that exists in the space. Other creators invited that character into chats and talked to the character. I don’t think that created a debt for Ember to exit the character and hand over real-world information just because people wanted to be friends. No one has shown proof of coercion or Ember pushing for sexual stuff beyond basic banter. It was ordinary chatting under the assumption created by the kayfabe. From the older internet rule I use, you aren’t owed someone’s offline body just because they presented their persona to you. Treating the later discovery as proof they should have confessed earlier feels entitled to me. They invited the avatar. The avatar showed up. The rest was optional. This only looks like a clear case of deception if you already start from the position that the physical person must override the character once the conversation is personal, or that anything the character says about being a woman is a literal claim about the operator’s body. I don’t start from that position. It’s a different standard for what an online identity is allowed to be, not a shared rule that one side is simply failing. The online person shared with you about their real self if they wanted. I understand why they’re upset though. From their culture , they entered those chats under a working assumption that the presented sex matched the real one, shared things they say they wouldn’t have shared otherwise, and later treated the mismatch as a broken premise. That feels like a violation if you believe the physicality stays relevant in private online relationships. I get that reaction. I just don’t share the rule that makes the offline details something other people were entitled to in the first place. This is why I don’t understand it myself outside of emulation.